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One month ago I attended the MoDELS’08 conference in Toulouse, France. Sounds important, isn’t it? 🙂 Well, it was to me. MoDELS’08 has been the first international conference I attended, and I am glad that I started with a relevant one. I had the chance to go there because my colleague Adrian and I had the paper “A Tentative Analysis of the Factors Affecting the Industrial Adoption of MDE“—the first paper accepted in my PhD programme—at the ChaMDE 2008 workshop, a satellite event of the conference.

The six-days conference had plenty of researchers from all over the world, including many of the “big names” in software engineering. Getting in touch with some of them was an honour. Many of the works presented at the conference were interesting. I even learned what “megamodelling” means. In my opinion, megamodelling is the most childish keyword ever appeared in computer science… However, the majority of these works were rather theoretical. The industry may never adopt model-driven engineering if the academy does not (quickly) provide anything useful to them. Of course, theory is fundamental, but sometimes I had the feeling of listening to speakers “selling thin air” rather than showing concrete results. Maybe one day I will be selling thin air as well, who knows… But for the time being it seems to me that research is software engineering is taking a dangerous path.

The city of Toulouse is gorgeous. So old and so modern at the same times, it offers a lot of sightseeing, attractions and restaurants where we had delicious meals and wines. I am waiting to upload a bunch of pictures on Flickr. Unfortunately, my Ubuntu 8.10 provides a buggy version of Digikam, and I have to wait for the developers to read my bug report and fix it.

That’s it folks at the moment. My next destination? NWPT’08 workshop in Tallin, Estonia, where I will have my first presentation. 🙂